Friday, March 08, 2013

Tohoku: little progress

It's sadly predictable, but still sad, that the spate of articles anticipating the 2-year anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake/tsunami can provide little more than a litany of bureacratic failure, despondency and stagnation.

Of course, rebuilding these economically nonviable retirement communities in the middle of nowhere was never a sensible solution, but it's a shame that no-one has managed to provide, assume, or assert sufficient leadership to actually drag the relevant parties towards sensible solutions. The emergency housing, which was initially designed for (and legally limited to) up to a year of use is now apparently going to be in operation for up to 10 years, or more prosaically, until sufficient numbers of its aging residents die out.

There are a couple of bright spots, where some fishermen are setting up local cooperatives. But I think they were struggling to find local labour even before the tsunami, with school-leavers heading off to seek their fortunes in the cities.

A P.S. from jules:
Here's part of the bridge over nothing... our legs are usually too tired from cycling or running to work to want climb these things unecessarily... so we'll still just cross the road "normally".

11 comments:

Although, do my eyes deceive me (note to self: more carrots) or is that an extremely adjacent second bridge to nowhere just steps away? (And a third one for that matter, although it appears to be crossing an intersecting road.)

And is JAMSTEC going to benefit from any of this benificence?

OT: So you're getting a visit from Tamsin? Is this by any chance connected to applying for the job with the vast Empire of Empty Research?

Steve, there are indeed several bridges. The original ones cross a more major road and can be seen here. The new ones are crossing horizontally, a little bit to the south of the southernmost end on that map. Yes, there is already a perfectly adequate pedestrian crossing over the main road there, I suppose they will probably decommission it to complete the inconvenience.

Our road is the minor one heading off SE from the junction - and looking at the pic, you can see it's actually already crossed by the existing bridge, not that any sane person would use that route.

I'm not sure to what extent JAMSTEC is benefitting from extra spending. I think they may be getting a new boat, but that may just be from the ordinary extra budget, and not the additional extra extra budget. It is sometimes hard to keep track of how many layers of stimulus we are up to. Perhaps that is the real goal?

Tamsin is indeed visiting us, but it's not job related, just the usual desperate attempt to spend up the ordinary annual budget. And, hopefully, realise some scientific benefits - not that the bureaucracy cares about that aspect, but we do!

Barely missing the anniversary, and in case anyone had decided to get more comfortable than they really should, TEPCO visits upon us another potential disaster, hopefully one that can ultimately be categorized as of the near variety. They seem to be saying the fuel wouldn't actually melt for four days, and that that's ever so much more time than they'll need to get some alternative cooling into operation. I was moved to mention this since at the moment I have a mental association between this blog and meltdowns (kidding, kidding, kidding...).

The quote I saw was from a TEPCO spokesman saying four days wouldn't be a problem, but of course that's slightly different from an affirmative statement that it would be a problem. But my money would be on them not really having a very good idea since data about the exact rod positioning and cladding defects would be a little tough to come by with any accuracy, even assuming things could be modeled correctly.

But depending on the response curve, from ~20C to ~65C in four days actually could be quite close to boiling. The water would then have to boil off so as to expose a portion of the rods, but I could imagine that taking only a day or two.

It would certainly take the least competent corporation in world history to fail to get some sort of emergency cooling in there a lot sooner than 4 days, so no worries I suppose. Oh wait...

Steve, this is just the cooling ponds with the spent fuel which have the power problem. It's really not the same thing as the broken reactors. Admittedly, this is TEPCO, so you can take everything with an ocean-load of mildly radioactive salt...

I know that, James. But ponds overstuffed (which they were IIRC) with relatively fresh (in the used sense) rods can be a worse risk than the reactors themselves. My memory of the incident is that that's the case here. I have a bit of a background in fission reactors, BTW, albeit long ago. The problem with such ponds isn't that significant fission would be likely to commence, but that the internal heat of the rods would be enough to melt through the cladding such that those nasty long-lived radionuclides would start being distributed into the air. That said, my impression is that enough rods are present for the extreme worst case, the proverbial fissioning slag pile burning down to the water table and then really going to town, although a number of things would have to go wrong in specific ways for that to happen. So let's hope they get the water turned back on real soon.